Once in a great while you hear a singer whose voice and presence is extraordinary. You know it at once. Eartha Kitt’s sultry insouciance. Joan Baez’s crystal purity. Janis Joplin’s edgy rawness. 

I’ve got another candidate for the list. She’s from Vermont, and nobody outside of Vermont has ever heard of her. So far. She’s Tammy Fletcher, lead singer for The Disciples and star of David Budbill’s currently-touring play, Little Acts of Kindness.

The first time I saw Fletcher was at Burlington’s Discover Jazz Festival. She and fellow Disciples were performing Sunday morning at the Gospel Tent. The night before, someone had insisted that I go hear her, and I had resisted. I’m one of those guys who believes you can’t get real Chinese food in an American restaurant, nobody makes cannolis like Italians, and white folks can’t sing gospel. So I was less than enthusiastic about a group of white folks called The Disciples, whose keyboard player was named Shapiro and whose singer hailed from Eden, Vermont.

I was wrong. Less than 10 minutes into the concert, I was a true believer. Andy Shapiro turned out to be a master on the keys and Tammy Fletcher turned out to be a goddess. 

There she stood, looking like Mama Cass and sounding like Janis-Joplin-meets-Big-Mama-Thornton. Her body, face and vocal chords expressed every nuance, every feeling of every song. Her delivery went right to the soul of both the music and the audience. Three words came to me: Big. Grace. Power.

No one who’s heard Fletcher sing can doubt her power. Her raspy angel voice can fill a room, a tent, a field. Her delivery is so strong that, when her microphone died in the middle of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Johnson Mud Bog Race last year, she simply cupped her hands and poured out the anthem unamplified. She got a standing ovation.

When Fletcher sang that Sunday morning at the Gospel Tent, I could not keep still. My knees jiggled, my feet tapped and, finally, I stood up and danced with joyous ecstasy. And I’m Jewish.

By the end of the show, I wanted to know everything about this woman. Who is she? How did she get this way? When was she going to hit the big time? I decided to meet her before she does.

Tammy Fletcher lives on a dirt road off a dirt road in the windswept hills of Eden. She shares a small cedar home with her 12-year-old son, Dakota, a three-legged dog named Webster and a cat named Zucchini. Her living room walls are bare but for a few flower prints; her tables are stacked with copies of National Geographic, Better Homes & Gardens and Gourmet. The kitchen is plastered with pictures of family and friends. One reveals a younger, thinner Tammy Fletcher with the man next to her razorbladed out of the photo.

Fletcher is feeling shaky. The previous night, she’d had a panic attack in anticipation of my coming. It was her first visit from an inquiring writer. Her head was a cyclone of thoughts, among them: Only a year ago I had nothing…and this writer’s coming tomorrow to uncover my secrets. How much should I reveal? How much can I conceal? 

Not much, as it turned out. Within two minutes of my arrival, she blurts out the story of her panic attack — which required the dispensations of an EMT squad. She laughs about it now. “I thought I was having a heart attack,” she says. “They told me my heart was fine; it was my head that was screwed up.”

I ask her how she got that way. She stretches out on the couch and begins. “I was born in Springfield, Vermont, on March 10, 1961. At two, my mother divorced my father and moved the family to an old stable in Benson — a place with grass growing through the floor. She had seven kids; I was the last.”

Fletcher grew up on country music: Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, Hank Snow. And she grew up poor. “My mother worked for years as a domestic and as a worker in a wig-making factory,” she tells me. “I remember her coming home reeking of chemicals and so tired she just slumped over the bed.”

The only member of her family to go to college — though she never graduated — Fletcher has supported herself and her son working as a high school tutor, a road-crew flaggirl, a heavy-equipment driver, a waitress and a bartender. “And,” she says, “there have been times when I had no work and went on welfare. I never want to be poor like that again. It’s so humiliating.” Recalling the heartlessness of an unemployment officer, she cries silently, then quickly recovers. “As you can tell, I’m an emotional person.”

While she talks, I’m thinking this woman looks and acts like Janis Joplin — the same superexpressive face, the instant crinkly smile, rapid emotional changes, even the wild, sandy, beauty-school-dropout hair.

Fletcher can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be a performer. As a young girl — not little girl, she says; she’s always been big — her head was filled with dreams of microphones, stages, spotlights, stardom. But where she grew up, this wasn’t typically considered an option. “You were a laborer, a truck driver, a secretary,” she says. “Sing to yourself, sing in the shower, sing to your baby — but don’t sing in public.”

But she finally did — at the end of a course at Community College of Vermont. By the time she’d finished the last line of “Me and Bobby McGee,” something had happened. “Everybody went nuts,” she recalls. “People applauded, they hugged me. They loved me.”

That was in 1991. Since then, she’s sung in bars, tents, festivals, weddings — and mud bogs. She gigged with two other Vermont bands — Bad Weather and The Cold Spring Blues Band — before hooking up with The Disciples. The recipe with Shapiro, bassist Stacey Starkweather, guitarist Bob Hill and drummer Barry Blinn seems to be cooking.

Onstage, Fletcher has the power to steal the hearts of hundreds with her captivating presence and a voice of copper and gold. “My singing is sincere,” she explains. “No matter if it’s three people in the audience or 300, they’re gonna get the same show.” The love she feels from the audience, she says, is the reason she loves to perform.

“Some people compare me with Janis, Aretha, Big Mama Thornton, Sophie Tucker, even Bette Midler,” Fletcher continues. “I always thought I sounded like a saxophone, even when I talked. Almost like honking.”

I’m just a writer. I can’t predict the future. But I do know that Tammy Fletcher’s “honk” is going to take her places — just about any place she wants. “Wherever it takes me, I’ll go,” she says. “When I’m singing it feels like everything is alright. Like if I die at this moment, I’ll die happy.”

This article appears in The Music Issue • 1995.